Wednesday, November 7, 2012

A California chef has been tried for murder after accidentally killing and boiling his wife. The case had been simmering for a while. Jurors were not persuaded on numerous fronts. It was difficult to make the case that the man had accidentally boiled his wife, inasmuch as he confessed to sticking her in a fifty-five gallon drum head first, keeping her submerged with weights, and slow-cooking her for four days. This, the jury felt strongly, had intention written all over it, even though--as the defense pointed out--the accused was a professional chef and yet failed to add the celery and carrots at any point. By chance or no, once he discovered he had boiled his wife in a vat, he disposed of most of the remains, by now quite flavorful, in the grease pit at his restaurant. Only the skull was left, and that, he says, he stored in the attic at his mother's house. This had the ring of truth, because the attic is where you store everything you don't really want anymore but can't bring yourself to throw away. Police dispatched to the location were unable to find the skull, but no one ever finds anything they're actually looking for in an attic. If they had gone up there to look for the Christmas ornaments, they might easily have stumbled across the skull. However, to date, no portions of the body are in evidence or, to put it another way, there are no leftovers.

Boiling a corpse is not unprecedented. In 1796, fierce General "Mad Anthony" Wayne sat down and died in a chair of gout. (The local museum still has the Chair Of Gout.) He was buried under the blockhouse and remained there for 13 years before his son arrived to unearth his remains and take them to the family plot in Pennsylvania. To everyone's surprise, most of him was still in nearly mint condition, preserved by the cold, when he was dug up. The son, who had been counting on a clean set of bones, had him stripped, dismembered, and boiled, and the meat was discarded. Nobody trusts gouty meat.

It is only natural for someone aiming to dispose of incriminating remains to fall back on the knowledge of his own experience--in the case of the California chef, cooking. Rare is the mailman, for instance, who has not given at least some thought to how to hide a body. Practices change over time. In my early days as a letter carrier, we would probably have gone with the old standby, misdelivering the corpse to a vacant house. Everybody does something like that sooner or later. Or, bodies can simply be stacked in the mailman's own garage with the rest of the mail. Modern carriers need only slap a garbled barcode on the remains and slip them in the mail stream, where they will loop endlessly around the country being stamped "undeliverable" until they fall apart.

The jury also had trouble believing that the murder itself was not deliberate, although here the defense was stronger. The accused admitted he had duct-taped his wife and then fallen asleep, and to his dismay she was dead by the time he woke up. Tellingly, he gave several different versions of why he duct-taped his wife, including to keep her from getting into her car while she was drunk and high on cocaine--a public service, if you will--and to get her to quit talking so he could get some sleep. The latter version is the more plausible. Anyone who drops dead when prevented from speaking is probably a pretty noisy individual.

He got away with his crime for two years, but panicked when it appeared that the police were closing in on him. He threw himself off an 80-foot cliff but succeeded only in tenderizing himself. But he was wise to try to avoid apprehension.

I love Fargo! I hadn't ever seen it until about a month ago, and it makes me sad I spent so much of my life without having that movie as part of it. But Silence of the Lambs? Most hated movie.....ever. Good quote fodder, but horribly scary. Saw it at the Roslyn Theater, and still have vivid nightmares from it this many years later.

There is a university in New England someplace I read about with a house back in the woods where they dump dead bodies (of animals) to make skeletons for research and teaching purposes. The house is full of some kind of horrible carnivorous beetles which strip the carcasses absolutely clean in a few weeks. I should think better than boiling in a slow cooker. But then we wouldn't have had your post. I saved my tea until AFTER I read it.

I just hate when little accidents like that get blown all out of proportion! For the record, Mad Anthony died in 1796, of gout complications. According to the legend, his son tried to haul his bones home in saddlebags and lost quite a few of them on the way. His ghost is supposed to wander some highway in PA that I forget the number of (it roughly is laid out on the old road from Erie to Philadelphia) every New Year, looking for the ones that got dropped. My Dad was a history professor and a Mad Anthony fan.

Much obliged! I think the problem here was I read about Mad Anthony on my downstairs computer and tried to remember stuff on my upstairs writing computer, which I don't allow to play on the internet, because then I'd never get anything done. Usually when I don't remember a detail I'd just put in an X instead of the date, but this time for some reason I just guessed he was in the Civil War instead of the Revolutionary War and stuck a real date in as a placeholder, and then when I transcribed the post I assumed I'd already double-checked it. And that's probably more than you wanted to know about my writing process. In any case, I am going to go edit the correct date in, thanks to you. I hate getting stuff wrong. WrongISH is okay.

You're welcome! Dad did his PhD at Ball State, and the entire struggle for the Old Northwest Territories was an area of local interest.

Actually, I liked finding out about your writing process and may consider adopting a similar strategy. The internet sort of irritates my ADD, and I am finding that my old way of writing, fountain pens and paper, makes for an extra step that I really don't need sometimes.

I've filled dozens of journals and always write with old fountain pens that fill from bottles. Because I still have that habit, I usually write my more serious stuff that way first. I'm convinced that my vocabulary is about +20% when I hand write.

I used to write like that but writers cramp is not an option when getting older (notice I said older and not old). Wore out two typewriters in college.Had it not been for word processors and spell check I'd look like a total idiot now. Oh I haven't checked in the mirror lately... never mind.

You know, Demeur, I'm old enough to have learned the Palmer method of handwriting, and we were supposed to move our arms rather than our fingers to prevent cramping, but of course I never did that. Then I got creative in fifth grade and started embellishing letters and making squirrelly "e"s and what with one thing and another, I can write about two sentences before I get tired, and no one (including me) can read the second one. I once thought that if I could afford an IBM Selectric I would never ask for anything else in my whole life. The word processor is a gift from the gods.

Swampy, I had one of those pens in fifth grade, with the cool little rubber bulb and all. My father thought it was essential. I don't remember ever using it after that year. I wonder what happened to it?

Feltmaker. Run a body through the drum carder, add olive oil soap, hot water and turn 'em into an area rug. On the other hand, I'm also a raptor rehabber and I can slice a cow's heart into 16 perfect portions for one eagle, 2 barred owls, 2 GHO, 2 vultures, 1 red tail hawk, 2 RSH and 6 screech owls. We could expand the aviary...

Dave and I have been hooked, to the tune of playing every day at least a little for the last 20 or so years, to computer Boggle: In Your Face. The letters keep rising and being replaced and you have to smack them down.

A local gardening guru said that if your pet weighed less than ten kilos you could compost it. I have four compost bins at the moment, and have told the skinny portion that if I buy another he should consider himself at risk.

Isn't it great to have a husband who agrees to be a model? Mine has been Lewis, Clark, Oregon Trail pioneer, Depression Era itinerant, Clovis mammoth hunter, homesteader, and plenty of Joe Sixpacks and Happy Dads.

When I read the news story about the chef slow-cooking his wife's body, I was shocked, and traumatized. It was beyond anything I ever could have imagined....and now I get to read a version of it which makes it a bit easier to swallow. Laughter helps when something is too awful to imagine.Thanks, Murr.

I read this wide-eyed, wondering whether it was about a real news item or not! Having read the comments, I'm amazed to find it is! I loved your piece - very cleverly written! Thanks for the entertainment!

No clearer sign a chef was in charge than the eschewing of a crock pot (or twenty-seven), which would have done the job admirably, allowing him time to make a few plates of tapas with which to start the evening.